Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research Defending Community, Territory, and Relations

This Element addresses a range of pressing challenges and crises by introducing readers to the Maya struggle for land and self-determination in Belize, a former British colony situated in the Caribbean and Central America. In addition to foregrounding environmental relations, the text provides deeper understandings of Qʼeqchiʼ and Mopan Maya people's dynamic conceptions and collective defence of community and territory. To do so, the authors centre the voices, worldviews, and experiences of Maya leaders, youth, and organisers who are engaged in frontline resistance and mobilisations against institutionalised racism and contemporary forms of dispossession. Broadly, the content offers an example of how Indigenous communities are reckoning with the legacies of empire whilst confronting the structural violence and threats to land and life posed by the driving forces of capital accumulation, neoliberal development, and coloniality of the state. Ultimately, this Element illustrates the realities, repercussions, and transformative potential of grassroots movement-building 'from below.' This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.